Category: reason

Occupational Licensing Requirements in an Emergency

Some states are taking actions to relax occupational licensing requirements to address the COVID-19 pandemic. But these are pretty mild changes. A bill in Missouri, for example, would allow for application of a state license by reciprocity. That certainly makes sense for Missouri and may make sense nationally, coronavirus or not, but it does little if anything to increase the supply of health care works during the emergency. The State of Washington is making it easier for health care professionals to work in the state without an active license. That could increase the supply of workers modestly, if retired professionals want to go back to work. So too could Massachusetts’s acceleration of the licensing of medical school graduates. But if worst-case scenarios come to pass, with ICUs many times over capacity and many health care workers ill themselves, such steps could be insufficient. Presumably, some medical specialists will be diverted from other practice areas to care for COVID-19 patients, but their own caseload will not go away, so it’s unclear if that will make a sufficient difference.

Much of the discussion of occupational licensing focuses on hairdressers and personal trainers. It makes sense to highlight the professions for which the arguments for rigorous licensing requirements is weakest, but there is nowhere professional licensing has a greater effect than in health care. Some commentators, for example, have called for removing many existing limitations on physician assistants and registered nurses. Whatever the merits of such proposals in the long term, they are separate from the question of what licensing should be required during an emergency if a sufficient number of licensed health care workers are not available.

I would prefer to be treated by someone with just a year of nursing training than to be triaged to my own devices. Indeed, if there were no other alternatives, I would prefer to be taken care of by someone with minimal training, say a couple of weeks of in-class training followed by a couple weeks following around and assisting licensed medical professionals treating COVID-19 patients. Of course, I’m not saying that’s adequate, just that it’s probably better than nothing. Moreover, if trainees can accomplish some of the simpler tasks, that can free nurses, medical technicians, and doctors to perform some of the more difficult tasks. I imagine that most feel people feel the same way. If so, then it seems likely that should a shortage of health care professionals occur, states will temporarily lessen their licensing requirements. The problem, though, is that if they wait too long, they will not be able to give even the minimal training of the sort that I have described. Conducting minimal training after hospitals are already overwhelmed seems much less desirable than allowing training beforehand.

A sensible legal approach might be for states to pass laws, sooner rather than later, authorizing hospitals to hire anyone that they believe can help them meet their needs temporarily in the event of a labor shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic. If that is seen as likely to lead to abuse, hospitals might be required to propose hiring in an emergency to state administrative agencies, which could then grant or deny exemptions, much as labs wanting to create their own COVID-19 tests can apply for emergency use authorizations from the FDA. Either way, hospitals should be allowed to create their own internal training programs without the need for regulatory authorization. The graduates of such training programs would only be able to work should a state emergency exemption apply, so the state would still have an opportunity to decide that these graduates should not work.

It seems likely that hospitals might be able to find trainees, particularly if they pay them during their training. After all, closing retail establishments means that there is a large unemployed labor force, and states are not equipped even to process their applications for unemployment. Of course, relatively young adults at lower risk from coronavirus will be at lesser risk and thus more likely to apply.

Congress and state legislatures should be hard at work trying to mitigate worst case scenarios. If the relative lack of government actions since COVID-19 first began spreading in China is any sign, they are unlikely to think far in advance. But recent movements to close schools and encourage social distancing suggest some willingness to try to flatten the curve. The challenge now is for legislatures to take actions to reduce deaths if those efforts turn out to be inadequate.

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Occupational Licensing Requirements in an Emergency

Some states are taking actions to relax occupational licensing requirements to address the COVID-19 pandemic. But these are pretty mild changes. A bill in Missouri, for example, would allow for application of a state license by reciprocity. That certainly makes sense for Missouri and may make sense nationally, coronavirus or not, but it does little if anything to increase the supply of health care works during the emergency. The State of Washington is making it easier for health care professionals to work in the state without an active license. That could increase the supply of workers modestly, if retired professionals want to go back to work. So too could Massachusetts’s acceleration of the licensing of medical school graduates. But if worst-case scenarios come to pass, with ICUs many times over capacity and many health care workers ill themselves, such steps could be insufficient. Presumably, some medical specialists will be diverted from other practice areas to care for COVID-19 patients, but their own caseload will not go away, so it’s unclear if that will make a sufficient difference.

Much of the discussion of occupational licensing focuses on hairdressers and personal trainers. It makes sense to highlight the professions for which the arguments for rigorous licensing requirements is weakest, but there is nowhere professional licensing has a greater effect than in health care. Some commentators, for example, have called for removing many existing limitations on physician assistants and registered nurses. Whatever the merits of such proposals in the long term, they are separate from the question of what licensing should be required during an emergency if a sufficient number of licensed health care workers are not available.

I would prefer to be treated by someone with just a year of nursing training than to be triaged to my own devices. Indeed, if there were no other alternatives, I would prefer to be taken care of by someone with minimal training, say a couple of weeks of in-class training followed by a couple weeks following around and assisting licensed medical professionals treating COVID-19 patients. Of course, I’m not saying that’s adequate, just that it’s probably better than nothing. Moreover, if trainees can accomplish some of the simpler tasks, that can free nurses, medical technicians, and doctors to perform some of the more difficult tasks. I imagine that most feel people feel the same way. If so, then it seems likely that should a shortage of health care professionals occur, states will temporarily lessen their licensing requirements. The problem, though, is that if they wait too long, they will not be able to give even the minimal training of the sort that I have described. Conducting minimal training after hospitals are already overwhelmed seems much less desirable than allowing training beforehand.

A sensible legal approach might be for states to pass laws, sooner rather than later, authorizing hospitals to hire anyone that they believe can help them meet their needs temporarily in the event of a labor shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic. If that is seen as likely to lead to abuse, hospitals might be required to propose hiring in an emergency to state administrative agencies, which could then grant or deny exemptions, much as labs wanting to create their own COVID-19 tests can apply for emergency use authorizations from the FDA. Either way, hospitals should be allowed to create their own internal training programs without the need for regulatory authorization. The graduates of such training programs would only be able to work should a state emergency exemption apply, so the state would still have an opportunity to decide that these graduates should not work.

It seems likely that hospitals might be able to find trainees, particularly if they pay them during their training. After all, closing retail establishments means that there is a large unemployed labor force, and states are not equipped even to process their applications for unemployment. Of course, relatively young adults at lower risk from coronavirus will be at lesser risk and thus more likely to apply.

Congress and state legislatures should be hard at work trying to mitigate worst case scenarios. If the relative lack of government actions since COVID-19 first began spreading in China is any sign, they are unlikely to think far in advance. But recent movements to close schools and encourage social distancing suggest some willingness to try to flatten the curve. The challenge now is for legislatures to take actions to reduce deaths if those efforts turn out to be inadequate.

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The Constitutionality of Territorial Courts

I posted yesterday about my general claim that state courts, territorial courts, and the like are constitutional even though they do not comply with Article III. Here I’ll post about why.

The key is in four words of Article III that we don’t usually pay that much attention. It says: “The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”

The four key words are “of the United States.” That means that Article III does not speak to who can exercise the judicial power of other governments. And that is why there is no Article III problem with state courts, which exercise the judicial power of their respective states—the judicial power of the state of Connecticut, and so on.

All of this might seem obvious, but it extends to less obvious conclusions. The U.S. territories, for instance, are not states. But they have been governed by non-Article-III courts more or less since the founding. The Supreme Court upheld these courts in a confusing opinion known as American Insurance Co. v. Canter, but people aren’t quite sure why.

The answer is that territorial courts exercise the judicial power of their territories, just as state courts exercise the judicial power of their states. Indeed, the territorial courts upheld during the 19th century had their powers described in just those terms.

And that is true even though they were created by Congress. Congress has the power to govern territories and set up territorial governments, but those territorial governments have always been thought to exercise the powers of their own territories. That’s why territorial legislatures don’t have to be appointed by the President, and the same logic goes for territorial courts. (It also answers one of the several questions at issue in the PROMESA litigation about Puerto Rico bankruptcy, though as I’ve written that statute is unconstitutional for other reasons.)

The same logic also explains the constitutionality of tribal courts, of foreign, multinational, and international tribunals, and of some of the motley courts that Congress has recognized over time. As always, for more on this feel free to read the long article.

Tomorrow I’ll explain why military courts and so-called “Article I courts” are different.

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The Constitutionality of Territorial Courts

I posted yesterday about my general claim that state courts, territorial courts, and the like are constitutional even though they do not comply with Article III. Here I’ll post about why.

The key is in four words of Article III that we don’t usually pay that much attention. It says: “The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”

The four key words are “of the United States.” That means that Article III does not speak to who can exercise the judicial power of other governments. And that is why there is no Article III problem with state courts, which exercise the judicial power of their respective states—the judicial power of the state of Connecticut, and so on.

All of this might seem obvious, but it extends to less obvious conclusions. The U.S. territories, for instance, are not states. But they have been governed by non-Article-III courts more or less since the founding. The Supreme Court upheld these courts in a confusing opinion known as American Insurance Co. v. Canter, but people aren’t quite sure why.

The answer is that territorial courts exercise the judicial power of their territories, just as state courts exercise the judicial power of their states. Indeed, the territorial courts upheld during the 19th century had their powers described in just those terms.

And that is true even though they were created by Congress. Congress has the power to govern territories and set up territorial governments, but those territorial governments have always been thought to exercise the powers of their own territories. That’s why territorial legislatures don’t have to be appointed by the President, and the same logic goes for territorial courts. (It also answers one of the several questions at issue in the PROMESA litigation about Puerto Rico bankruptcy, though as I’ve written that statute is unconstitutional for other reasons.)

The same logic also explains the constitutionality of tribal courts, of foreign, multinational, and international tribunals, and of some of the motley courts that Congress has recognized over time. As always, for more on this feel free to read the long article.

Tomorrow I’ll explain why military courts and so-called “Article I courts” are different.

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via IFTTT

How the Coronavirus Might Kickstart the 21st Century

We know little for sure about how the COVID-19 pandemic is going to play out, especially in terms of the number of dead and the effect on the global economy. But this much seems to be a damn good bet: The disease is acting as an accelerant in creating a far more dispersed, decentralized, and devolved world in which we will paradoxically feel more connected than ever before while also keeping our literal and figurative distance from one another. In a year’s time—and a decade’s, too—you will be living, learning, and working far more online than you are now.

In short, rapid innovations in learning, working, and living online could be a silver lining. Welcome to the 21st century we dreamed about 30 years ago but never quite had the energy or focus to actually implement. Since the 1990s, champions of what was then called cyberspace and digital culture prophesied about “creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” Every issue of the early Wired promised a peaceful “Digital Revolution” that would whip “through our lives like a Bengali typhoon” and create real and virtual worlds in which we could let our 3D-printed freak flags fly however we chose.

In 1990’s Life After Television, George Gilder (then widely known for his reactionary, anti-feminist polemic Sexual Suicide) gazed upon networked machines he called “telecomputers” and dreamed of a world in which political and corporate hierarchies were smashed by user-generated “hetarchies” and “you could spend a day interacting with Henry Kissinger, Kim Basinger, or Billy Graham” on whatever terms were mutually agreed upon. With the end of “bottlenecks” caused by centralized political, technological, and economic control, telecomputers would revitalize “family, religion, education, and the arts” and other institutions that “preserve and transmit civilization to new generations.”

Much of all that has become reality in some recognizable forms. With the rise of the internet and the user-friendly interface laid on top of it, the World Wide Web as a global platform, the world has become much more inclusive and all participants, even the poorest among us, have more options and more control over how we work, what we consume, and how we relate to one another. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’ve half-assed it until now. The digital future has figuratively sat in our living room like a piece of complicated and ambitious exercise equipment that, once purchased, is rarely used and now serves mostly as a place to drape dirty clothes.

Our response to COVID-19 has great potential to change all that. The changes that persist after the crisis has passed could, finally, radically change how we work and learn, get medical care, shop, and consume popular culture as more and more of our lives will take place online and, hopefully, on our own personalized terms.

Over 30 states have shuttered K-12 public schools and districts everywhere are scrambling to figure out how to implement distance-learning programs to salvage some semblance of continuing instruction. Colleges across the country have canceled classes at least through the end of March and it seems iffy whether they will return at all for the spring semester. Educational institutions at all levels are scrambling to ramp up their ability to stream classes, which is not just a bandwidth issue but one of preparing instructors on how to teach and students to learn via the internet. While participation in distance learning has grown by leaps and bounds since 2000, fewer than 6 percent of all public K-12 students take a majority of all their courses online. There’s every reason to believe that once they get a sense of the flexibility and offerings available, those numbers will rise substantially.

The president is distributing government guidelines urging workers who can do their jobs via the internet to do so until further notice. Among the journalists and analysts who write about telecommuting, working from home is nothing new. I’ve been working from home basically full time since 1996, when I moved from Reason‘s Los Angeles headquarters to the remote prison town of Huntsville, Texas, where my then-wife had gotten a faculty position at Sam Houston State University. But what many “knowledge economy” workers take for granted is anything but common. While the share of workers telecommuting has been increasing steadily over the past 20 or more years, just 3.6 percent of the American workers “currently work at home half-time or more,” according the American Community Survey. 

Yet over half of all employees have a job where at least some of what they do could be done remotely and fully 80 percent of workers pre-COVID-19 say they want to work from home at least part of the time, according to analyst Kate Lister. Free or nearly free video- and teleconferencing enabled by Google, Skype, and Zoom is booming and won’t stop once we all test negative for illness. It’s inconceivable that working from home won’t gain vastly in popularity (both among workers and management) even when the government says it’s OK to return to our traditional workplaces.

Our lives as consumers will change definitively too, for goods and services that are both banal and important. In the past few years, for instance, telemedicine has grown in popularity, especially for counseling services, but still accounts for less than 1 percent of insurance claims. Now it’s being encouraged not just by overburdened health-care systems but by the very governments that long frowned upon it. Effective March 6, new regulations loosened the ability of Medicare and Medicaid providers to dispense medical advice via the internet. Movie theaters and sports leagues have long been suffering declines in attendance, as high-quality, cheap flatscreen TVs and sound systems proliferated and streaming services starting delivering most of what we wanted whenever we wanted it. Even as the number of theater screens has continued to grow and the number of films getting theatrical releases continues to climb, fewer people want to buy tickets for a night out. Of course people will head back out to the local multiplex and sports venues once they are reopened, but they will likely number even fewer than before. 

COVID-19 is a windfall not just for Amazon’s traditional products—the online-retail behemoth is hiring an additional 100,000 workers to meet demand over the next few weeks or months—but for online grocery delivery services too. Even before the outbreak, business had been booming online, with sales more than doubling to $26 billion between 2016 and 2018, even while serving fewer than 10 percent of customers.

Especially among media people who report on such topics, the triumph of e-commerce has been a given for at least a decade if not longer. But it was only last February that “online sales narrowly beat general merchandise stores, including department stores, warehouse clubs and super-centers. Non-store retail sales last month accounted for 11.813 percent of the total, compared with 11.807 percent for general merchandise.” When other types of purchases such as houses, cars, and prepared meals are factored in, bricks-and-mortar commerce still outstrips online, but that is changing and will certainly be super-charged by the current lockdown. Indeed, even before COVID-19, companies such as Carvana and Vroom were starting to advertise a fully online experience to buy automobiles, while more and more parts of house buying such as finding listings and doing virtual tours have moved online. 

While much was made of minor upticks in people moving to cities in the early 2010s, the longer-term trend has been about Americans increasingly choosing the suburbs, even before COVID-19. As demographer William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution wrote last year, “In many respects, the city growth dominance earlier in the decade was an aberration of historical patterns— perhaps a result of the down housing market following the Great Recession, and the ‘stuck in place’ millennial generation. Now, the new census data suggest that earlier suburbanization patterns are re-emerging.” Suburban living (and small-town living, for that matter) are made more attractive when goods and cultural offerings once only available in big cities are made readily available online and through next-day (or even same-day) delivery. Add in the fear factor of dense populations and infection, and it seems like COVID-19 will speed up the dissipation of urban areas.

Then there is the governmental response. Paradoxically, local, state, and federal governments are flexing, enacting emergency measures rarely or never seen before in peacetime. Across the country, mayors and governors are declaring states of emergencies and shutting down bars, gyms, and other gathering places, putting limits on the number of people who can gather at one time, and even issuing curfews. Yet these same leaders—and members of the federal government from the president on down—are also waiving or loosening longstanding regulations, at least temporarily. The Transportation Security Administration has reversed course and now allows 12-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer where just days ago it insisted that any container with more than 3.4 ounces of fluid or gel was an unacceptable security risk. The Food and Drug Administration, which has famously dragged its heels on all sorts of expedited approvals even for drugs shown safe and effective in Europe, issued almost immediate approval for a new coronavirus testing protocol. The governor of Massachusetts deigned to allow medical professionals licensed to practice in other states to work in the Bay State without going through a timely and expensive certification process.

At virtually every level in the United States, the government response to COVID-19 has been mostly incompetence on the one hand and overreaction on the other. Arguably, the most important conversation we will have as a society post-outbreak is one about the lessons being taught in real time about limited-but-effective public policy. Countries such South Korea and Singapore, despite authoritarian tendencies, responded swiftly and successfully to the outbreak in ways that foregrounded transparency and information-sharing rather than lockdowns and mandatory closings and quarantines (though both nations did some of both). If past is prologue, governments at all levels will be slow to give up the power they are currently exercising, but the weight of public opinion and examples from our work, cultural, and commercial lives might prove an effective counterweight.

President Trump recently said that it would likely be July before the current crisis passed. Whenever the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, though, it will likely change the coming decades every bit as much as the 9/11 attacks and the 2008 financial crisis changed the past 20 years. Looking back on the cultural, economic, and political responses to those events, it’s hard to say that the country responded wisely. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the explosion in government spending under first George W. Bush and then Barack Obama are harder to justify with every passing year. As a society, rather than coming together, we became increasingly polarized and distrustful of public and private institutions. That dynamic, however understandable and predictable, has only made things worse.

This time, we stand on a different threshold. We are wearier and warier than ever, for sure, of what the government might do for us. Even in the early days of this situation, we know that a strong response to the pandemic ultimately relies more on our actions as individuals with agency and autonomy than it does on the ministrations of the Donald Trumps and Joe Bidens and Bernie Sanderses of the world.

The best possible outcome is one that leads to the future that helped fire up our imaginations 30 years ago to dream of a world in which we all were able to participate more fully, express ourselves more cogently, and live how and where we desire. Ironically, the shift online being forced by COVID-19—a global health crisis that many are comparing to the 1918 flu epidemic, one of the defining events of the old 20th century—might finally conjure the future as we once dared to dream about it.

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via IFTTT

How the Coronavirus Might Kickstart the 21st Century

We know little for sure about how the COVID-19 pandemic is going to play out, especially in terms of the number of dead and the effect on the global economy. But this much seems to be a damn good bet: The disease is acting as an accelerant in creating a far more dispersed, decentralized, and devolved world in which we will paradoxically feel more connected than ever before while also keeping our literal and figurative distance from one another. In a year’s time—and a decade’s, too—you will be living, learning, and working far more online than you are now.

In short, rapid innovations in learning, working, and living online could be a silver lining. Welcome to the 21st century we dreamed about 30 years ago but never quite had the energy or focus to actually implement. Since the 1990s, champions of what was then called cyberspace and digital culture prophesied about “creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” Every issue of the early Wired promised a peaceful “Digital Revolution” that would whip “through our lives like a Bengali typhoon” and create real and virtual worlds in which we could let our 3D-printed freak flags fly however we chose.

In 1990’s Life After Television, George Gilder (then widely known for his reactionary, anti-feminist polemic Sexual Suicide) gazed upon networked machines he called “telecomputers” and dreamed of a world in which political and corporate hierarchies were smashed by user-generated “hetarchies” and “you could spend a day interacting with Henry Kissinger, Kim Basinger, or Billy Graham” on whatever terms were mutually agreed upon. With the end of “bottlenecks” caused by centralized political, technological, and economic control, telecomputers would revitalize “family, religion, education, and the arts” and other institutions that “preserve and transmit civilization to new generations.”

Much of all that has become reality in some recognizable forms. With the rise of the internet and the user-friendly interface laid on top of it, the World Wide Web as a global platform, the world has become much more inclusive and all participants, even the poorest among us, have more options and more control over how we work, what we consume, and how we relate to one another. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’ve half-assed it until now. The digital future has figuratively sat in our living room like a piece of complicated and ambitious exercise equipment that, once purchased, is rarely used and now serves mostly as a place to drape dirty clothes.

Our response to COVID-19 has great potential to change all that. The changes that persist after the crisis has passed could, finally, radically change how we work and learn, get medical care, shop, and consume popular culture as more and more of our lives will take place online and, hopefully, on our own personalized terms.

Over 30 states have shuttered K-12 public schools and districts everywhere are scrambling to figure out how to implement distance-learning programs to salvage some semblance of continuing instruction. Colleges across the country have canceled classes at least through the end of March and it seems iffy whether they will return at all for the spring semester. Educational institutions at all levels are scrambling to ramp up their ability to stream classes, which is not just a bandwidth issue but one of preparing instructors on how to teach and students to learn via the internet. While participation in distance learning has grown by leaps and bounds since 2000, fewer than 6 percent of all public K-12 students take a majority of all their courses online. There’s every reason to believe that once they get a sense of the flexibility and offerings available, those numbers will rise substantially.

The president is distributing government guidelines urging workers who can do their jobs via the internet to do so until further notice. Among the journalists and analysts who write about telecommuting, working from home is nothing new. I’ve been working from home basically full time since 1996, when I moved from Reason‘s Los Angeles headquarters to the remote prison town of Huntsville, Texas, where my then-wife had gotten a faculty position at Sam Houston State University. But what many “knowledge economy” workers take for granted is anything but common. While the share of workers telecommuting has been increasing steadily over the past 20 or more years, just 3.6 percent of the American workers “currently work at home half-time or more,” according the American Community Survey. 

Yet over half of all employees have a job where at least some of what they do could be done remotely and fully 80 percent of workers pre-COVID-19 say they want to work from home at least part of the time, according to analyst Kate Lister. Free or nearly free video- and teleconferencing enabled by Google, Skype, and Zoom is booming and won’t stop once we all test negative for illness. It’s inconceivable that working from home won’t gain vastly in popularity (both among workers and management) even when the government says it’s OK to return to our traditional workplaces.

Our lives as consumers will change definitively too, for goods and services that are both banal and important. In the past few years, for instance, telemedicine has grown in popularity, especially for counseling services, but still accounts for less than 1 percent of insurance claims. Now it’s being encouraged not just by overburdened health-care systems but by the very governments that long frowned upon it. Effective March 6, new regulations loosened the ability of Medicare and Medicaid providers to dispense medical advice via the internet. Movie theaters and sports leagues have long been suffering declines in attendance, as high-quality, cheap flatscreen TVs and sound systems proliferated and streaming services starting delivering most of what we wanted whenever we wanted it. Even as the number of theater screens has continued to grow and the number of films getting theatrical releases continues to climb, fewer people want to buy tickets for a night out. Of course people will head back out to the local multiplex and sports venues once they are reopened, but they will likely number even fewer than before. 

COVID-19 is a windfall not just for Amazon’s traditional products—the online-retail behemoth is hiring an additional 100,000 workers to meet demand over the next few weeks or months—but for online grocery delivery services too. Even before the outbreak, business had been booming online, with sales more than doubling to $26 billion between 2016 and 2018, even while serving fewer than 10 percent of customers.

Especially among media people who report on such topics, the triumph of e-commerce has been a given for at least a decade if not longer. But it was only last February that “online sales narrowly beat general merchandise stores, including department stores, warehouse clubs and super-centers. Non-store retail sales last month accounted for 11.813 percent of the total, compared with 11.807 percent for general merchandise.” When other types of purchases such as houses, cars, and prepared meals are factored in, bricks-and-mortar commerce still outstrips online, but that is changing and will certainly be super-charged by the current lockdown. Indeed, even before COVID-19, companies such as Carvana and Vroom were starting to advertise a fully online experience to buy automobiles, while more and more parts of house buying such as finding listings and doing virtual tours have moved online. 

While much was made of minor upticks in people moving to cities in the early 2010s, the longer-term trend has been about Americans increasingly choosing the suburbs, even before COVID-19. As demographer William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution wrote last year, “In many respects, the city growth dominance earlier in the decade was an aberration of historical patterns— perhaps a result of the down housing market following the Great Recession, and the ‘stuck in place’ millennial generation. Now, the new census data suggest that earlier suburbanization patterns are re-emerging.” Suburban living (and small-town living, for that matter) are made more attractive when goods and cultural offerings once only available in big cities are made readily available online and through next-day (or even same-day) delivery. Add in the fear factor of dense populations and infection, and it seems like COVID-19 will speed up the dissipation of urban areas.

Then there is the governmental response. Paradoxically, local, state, and federal governments are flexing, enacting emergency measures rarely or never seen before in peacetime. Across the country, mayors and governors are declaring states of emergencies and shutting down bars, gyms, and other gathering places, putting limits on the number of people who can gather at one time, and even issuing curfews. Yet these same leaders—and members of the federal government from the president on down—are also waiving or loosening longstanding regulations, at least temporarily. The Transportation Security Administration has reversed course and now allows 12-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer where just days ago it insisted that any container with more than 3.4 ounces of fluid or gel was an unacceptable security risk. The Food and Drug Administration, which has famously dragged its heels on all sorts of expedited approvals even for drugs shown safe and effective in Europe, issued almost immediate approval for a new coronavirus testing protocol. The governor of Massachusetts deigned to allow medical professionals licensed to practice in other states to work in the Bay State without going through a timely and expensive certification process.

At virtually every level in the United States, the government response to COVID-19 has been mostly incompetence on the one hand and overreaction on the other. Arguably, the most important conversation we will have as a society post-outbreak is one about the lessons being taught in real time about limited-but-effective public policy. Countries such South Korea and Singapore, despite authoritarian tendencies, responded swiftly and successfully to the outbreak in ways that foregrounded transparency and information-sharing rather than lockdowns and mandatory closings and quarantines (though both nations did some of both). If past is prologue, governments at all levels will be slow to give up the power they are currently exercising, but the weight of public opinion and examples from our work, cultural, and commercial lives might prove an effective counterweight.

President Trump recently said that it would likely be July before the current crisis passed. Whenever the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, though, it will likely change the coming decades every bit as much as the 9/11 attacks and the 2008 financial crisis changed the past 20 years. Looking back on the cultural, economic, and political responses to those events, it’s hard to say that the country responded wisely. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the explosion in government spending under first George W. Bush and then Barack Obama are harder to justify with every passing year. As a society, rather than coming together, we became increasingly polarized and distrustful of public and private institutions. That dynamic, however understandable and predictable, has only made things worse.

This time, we stand on a different threshold. We are wearier and warier than ever, for sure, of what the government might do for us. Even in the early days of this situation, we know that a strong response to the pandemic ultimately relies more on our actions as individuals with agency and autonomy than it does on the ministrations of the Donald Trumps and Joe Bidens and Bernie Sanderses of the world.

The best possible outcome is one that leads to the future that helped fire up our imaginations 30 years ago to dream of a world in which we all were able to participate more fully, express ourselves more cogently, and live how and where we desire. Ironically, the shift online being forced by COVID-19—a global health crisis that many are comparing to the 1918 flu epidemic, one of the defining events of the old 20th century—might finally conjure the future as we once dared to dream about it.

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Italian Daily Death Rate Up 20% Because of Coronavirus, Lombardy Up About 80%

Italy’s population is about 60 million, and its normal death rate is 10.6 per 1000, for about 640,000 deaths per year, or about 1750 per day; the 350 or so extra deaths per day over the last couple of days (if this worldometers.info data is correct) are about 20%.

But apparently about 2/3 of the deaths have been in Lombardy (in Northern Italy; Milan is the capital), which has about 1/6 of Italy’s population. If the daily deaths are likewise 2/3 in Lombardy (not certain, because it’s possible that the geographical incidence of the deaths has changed over time), then we’re talking about 240 or so extra deaths per day on top of the usual 300 or so in Lombardy, or about 80%.

These are unusually high numbers, of course, since Italy appears to have the highest death rate of any country right now; and of course they are just the numbers for the last couple of days. (Daily deaths in China have apparently fallen sharply, after climbing sharply and then staying high for a couple of weeks.) They are also back-of-the-envelope estimates based on imperfect data, but I hope they give a more useful perspective on the magnitude of the epidemic than do the raw numbers.

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Italian Daily Death Rate Up 20% Because of Coronavirus, Lombardy Up About 80%

Italy’s population is about 60 million, and its normal death rate is 10.6 per 1000, for about 640,000 deaths per year, or about 1750 per day; the 350 or so extra deaths per day over the last couple of days (if this worldometers.info data is correct) are about 20%.

But apparently about 2/3 of the deaths have been in Lombardy (in Northern Italy; Milan is the capital), which has about 1/6 of Italy’s population. If the daily deaths are likewise 2/3 in Lombardy (not certain, because it’s possible that the geographical incidence of the deaths has changed over time), then we’re talking about 240 or so extra deaths per day on top of the usual 300 or so in Lombardy, or about 80%.

These are unusually high numbers, of course, since Italy appears to have the highest death rate of any country right now; and of course they are just the numbers for the last couple of days. (Daily deaths in China have apparently fallen sharply, after climbing sharply and then staying high for a couple of weeks.) They are also back-of-the-envelope estimates based on imperfect data, but I hope they give a more useful perspective on the magnitude of the epidemic than do the raw numbers.

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Stop It With the Coronavirus Curfews Already

Now that sports have been effectively canceled, there is apparently a new competition afoot in this coronavirus-cursed country: Politicians vying to see who can impose the most freedom-infringing clampdown in the name of flattening the curve.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy on Monday evening “strongly suggested” a statewide curfew between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m., with exceptions made only for emergencies and “essential travel,” whatever that means. For now, this designation falls short of an official order, resting instead in the vaguely threatening legal zone of strong discouragement, though the governor has literally promised “more draconian steps” in the future.

The move came concurrently as a “shelter in place” order for the 7 million residents of six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area, who are now permitted to leave their own homes only “to provide or receive certain essential services or engage in certain essential activities and work for essential business or government services.” Violating the order is a misdeameanor that—according to the order!—”constitutes an imminent threat and creates an immediate menace to public health.” Don’t worry, though; San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said that cops will be taking a “compassionate, commonsense approach” to enforcement.

“We’re absolutely considering that,” New York City’s clownpants mayor Bill de Blasio added this morning.

It is worth thinking this stuff through a bit more than your average politician. I sit squarely on the worst-case-scenario side of the spectrum and have been practicing the kinds of social distancing de Blasio is only belatedly preaching, but there are a least four main commonsense objections to curfews that arise even before you start considering the constitutionality and massive economic impact of it all.

1) Shutting most everything down creates real shortages, not just the no-toilet-paper-at-Whole-Foods kind. The more people and industries you order locked down, the more supply chains get broken, the more stores shutter, the fewer goods are available. We all still need stuff, even if we’re sitting indoors all day. And in cramped, big cities like New York, where living space is at a premium, there is frequently neither storage space nor predilection for stocking up on weeks’ worth of food at a time.

2) Compressing the commercial day will mean more people shopping together in close quarters. The smart play until now among germaphobes has been hitting up the local Rite Aid in the wee small hours. Mayors, county executives, and governors are increasingly foreclosing that option.

3) Law enforcement has more urgent priorities than policing the free movement of citizens. At a moment when National Guard reservists are being called up to build emergency ICU capacity, do we really want available man/womanpower scaring peaceable residents straight?

4) Human beings do not have a limitless capacity for self-imprisonment. We are about to see a lot of resentment from the healthy Youngs about how they no longer have jobs or the ability to make student loan payments because of draconian governmental measures to combat a disease disproportionately affecting the Olds. But even setting that aside, in the absence of V-1 bombs flying overhead, people are eventually going to bust out of their containment. Setting up legal regimes in contravention of human nature is a recipe for all kinds of trouble.

How do these curfews and mandatory quarantines end? No really, how do they? What does success look like? When is the “emergency” over? We see very little acknowledgment that these questions are even relevant, let alone attempts to answer them amid the cascade of competitive shutdowns.

I, too, urgently hope that people mostly stay the hell away from each other over the coming weeks. But not at gunpoint, and not in such a way that creates new and perhaps even worse pathways for unhealthy behavior. Let’s be careful out there both personally and governmentally.

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Stop It With the Coronavirus Curfews Already

Now that sports have been effectively canceled, there is apparently a new competition afoot in this coronavirus-cursed country: Politicians vying to see who can impose the most freedom-infringing clampdown in the name of flattening the curve.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy Monday evening “strongly suggested” a statewide curfew between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m., with exceptions made only for emergencies and “essential travel,” whatever that means. For now, this designation falls short of an official order, resting instead in the vaguely threatening legal zone of strong discouragement, though the governor has literally promised “more draconian steps” in the future.

The move came concurrently as a “shelter in place” order for the 7 million residents of six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area, who are now permitted to leave their own homes only “to provide or receive certain essential services or engage in certain essential activities and work for essential business or government services.” Violating the order is a misdeameanor that—according to the order!—”constitutes an imminent threat and creates an immediate menace to public health.” Don’t worry, though; San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said that cops will be taking a “compassionate, commonsense approach” to enforcement.

“We’re absolutely considering that,” New York City’s clownpants Mayor Bill de Blasio added this morning.

It is worth thinking this stuff through a bit more than your average politician. I sit squarely on the worst-case scenario side of the spectrum, and have been practicing the kinds of social distancing de Blasio is only belatedly preaching, but there are a least four main commonsense objections to curfews that arise even before you start considering the constitutionality and massive economic impact of it all.

1) Shutting most everything down creates real shortages, not just the no-toilet-paper-at-Whole-Foods kind. The more people and industries you order locked down, the more supply chains get broken, the more stores shutter, the fewer goods are available. We all still need stuff, even if we’re sitting indoors all day. And in cramped, big cities like New York, where living space is at a premium, there is frequently neither storage space nor predilection for stocking up on weeks’ worth of food at a time.

2) Compressing the commercial day will mean more people shopping together in close quarters. The smart play until now among germaphobes has been hitting up the local Rite Aid in the wee small hours. Mayors, county executives, and governors are increasingly foreclosing that option.

3) Law enforcement has more urgent priorities than policing the free movement of citizens. At a moment when National Guard reservists are being called up to build emergency ICU capacity, do we really want available man/womanpower scaring peaceable residents straight?

4) Human beings do not have a limitless capacity for self-imprisonment. We are about to see a lot of resentment from the healthy Youngs about how they no longer have jobs or the ability to make student loan payments because of draconian governmental measures to combat a disease disproportionately affecting the Olds. But even setting that aside, in the absence of V-1 bombs flying overhead, people are eventually going to bust out of their containment. Setting up legal regimes in contravention of human nature is a recipe for all kinds of trouble.

How do these curfews and mandatory quarantines end? No really, how do they? What does success look like? When is the “emergency” over? We see very little acknowledgment that these questions are even relevant, let alone attempts to answer them amid the cascade of competitive shutdowns.

I, too, urgently hope that people mostly stay the hell away from each other over the coming weeks. But not at gunpoint, and not in such a way that creates new and perhaps even worse pathways for unhealthy behavior. Let’s be careful out there both personally and governmentally.

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